


lonely tourist in a summer dress

by leiascully



Category: Pushing Daisies
Genre: Multi, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-24
Updated: 2007-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-03 05:07:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was not the way the fairytale was supposed to end, not in mid-sized middle America, not in this whimsical bakery where they made confectionery dreams come true. But Chuck had read the old fairy tales.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lonely tourist in a summer dress

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: n/a  
> A/N: Written for [**minim_calibre**](http://minim-calibre.livejournal.com/) as part of Yuletide Madness. Many thanks to [**roga**](http://roga.livejournal.com/) and [**julietcetera**](http://julietcetera.livejournal.com/) for the beta.   
> Disclaimer: _Pushing Daisies_ and all related-characters are the property of Bryan Fuller and NBC Network. I make no profit from this and no infringement is intended.

Charlotte Charles had been alive for three months, two weeks, four days, seventeen hours, and six minutes, which was not something she would have known in her previous twenty-odd years of living, before a plastic bag came down over her head. It was strange to think that all her previous life she had been counting down to that moment when she'd leaned into the ice machine; now she was counting up, if Digby's extraordinary longevity was any indication.

It was the piemaker who had brought her to life, more deliberately than even her own parents. Her mother and father had, after all, never met her before her birth, but the piemaker had had some inkling of the Charlotte Charles she had been before her untimely death on the cruise ship. He had set her heart beating again and rechristened her, restoring her to the life she'd longed for. Only it wasn't the life she'd longed for, exactly. No longer was she lonely tourist Charlotte Charles, making her first forays outside the aunt's iron-bound yard. Now she was the piemaker's Chuck, Ned's Chuck, with a closet full of bright dresses and a partition in the car for the frequent trips to the morgue. There was a time Chuck had hid her face behind walls and windows; now she had sunglasses and more secrets than she ever dreamed of.

In a way, Chuck was amused by the piemaker's skittishness, his reluctance to offend. She remembered him less somber, when they were children, but each day, his smiles came a little more easily, a little less tarnished with the dank of old memories. Chuck kneaded pastry and baked pies and tended her bees; the piemaker stood in his apron with a smile twisted into the corner of his mouth as he heaped tarts with slices of perfect fruits, his hands gloved. They were building a life out of overripe peaches and embraces made awkward by the bulk of beekeeping suits.

Chuck thought about aunts Lily and Vivian, cloistered in the home she loved. She thought of the shadowy kink in the stairway, of her little suite of rooms like the chambers of a heart. Despite the historical erotica and the sensuous costumes, she does not think that the aunts understood the importance of touch. She thought about the piemaker and their two twin beds. She imagined long satin gloves, the landscape of his bones under her fingers if she could touch him. But even gloves end somewhere, and she was tired of the constant need for prophylaxis: cloth, plastic, the firm barrier of air between their yearning bodies. She wanted to touch his skin. Funny: all her life, her first life, content with the aunts but dreaming of her lost prince to melt into, to wrap herself around, to be one with, and now he had found her, and they were still two.

Olive could solve the problem. After all, Olive wasn't troubled by the dangers of bare shoulders. Chuck dreamed, once, that the piemaker was telling Olive where to touch her, Chuck; Olive's fingers were cool but steady. And she, Chuck, could tell Olive how and where to touch the piemaker, and relieve a little of the awful tension between the three of them. She wondered if it would work in daylight, or in the shadows of the waking world: all that skin, all that possibility. Then again, Ned had always been jealous and bereft, and she, longing as she did for the touch of his mouth, hardly felt she could be satisfied by any other lips. First kiss, last kiss. There was a beautiful symmetry in that no matter how deft Olive's hands were, and how bright her smile. Chuck held her tongue as Olive clasped her hands, and disguised the thud of her heart each time they embraced, which was oftener and oftener. Olive was a hugger. Was it her touch or would any touch do? She thought she knew, but so few sparks had passed between her skin and someone else's, and Olive didn't seem to feel it. Chuck, uncertain, was caught between ache and heartbreak whichever way she turned.

It was suspension. It was stasis. It was détente, a show of peaceful easing that did nothing for the reality of the situation. The three of them were sleeping with the wall to separate them: cotton, air, the opaque haze of dream in which they reached out across the space between the beds but did not touch each other. Ned was life and death. Olive was only life.

This was not the way the fairytale was supposed to end, not in mid-sized middle America, not in this whimsical bakery where they made confectionery dreams come true. But Chuck had read the old fairy tales, the dire, dour, dark and twisted German stories with their umlauts and the knotty, grim, sardonic French contes full of wicked fairies. She knew that Hansel and Gretel paid their own price worse than sore stomachs for devouring the witch's gingerbread house. She remembered the little mermaid with the soles of her new feet scored bloody and the feeling of walking on glass shards. It was enough to be breathing near him, to share meals, to see him come out of the shower with his hair damp and his chest bare. It was enough to work with Olive in the kitchen, smudges of flour on her own face and Olive always grinning, always glowing, a flash of peachy cleavage and brightness that left an impression on the eyes for long minutes afterwards, like the flash of a camera.

When Chuck dreamed, it was not about Ned. For a moment she felt guilty, caught up by her waking self, but her confusion dissolved when Olive stroked her wrist with a shy smile. The touch melted in her mouth like bittersweet chocolate. _I taste you_, she said wonderingly, and Olive laughed and undid each of their twenty-four buttons, their two zippers. Her skin sang under Chuck's fingertips. Synesthesia, the word drifted past, sparking in the air, and Chuck bit down on the word against the pleasure of being _touched_, of being _known_. Olive explored her and Chuck discovered herself and Olive too. She spoke in languages she'd forgotten she knew. _Oh, honey,_ said Olive, and each bone of her spine rang out like a bell as Chuck drew her hand raggedly down. _I thought,_ said Chuck, and stopped, because now she _knew_. Olive hummed contentedly and stroked Chuck's hair away from their two flushed faces.

In the morning she woke like coming out of a long warm bath and turned to Ned. He was watching her, quiet the way he usually was. His expression was warmly fond, but beyond that, she couldn't read his thoughts. Ned, beautiful longing Ned, who had too many secrets from the world. She would be an open book to him, though he could not turn the pages. Maybe he would open to her. "I dreamed about Olive," she said impulsively.

"So did I," he said, and did not look away.


End file.
